This book showcases the Herculaneum Conservation Project, set up by the Packard Humanities Institute in 2001, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei and the British School at Rome, to conserve the disintegrating fabric of the excavated remains of Herculaneum. As Wallace-Hadrill states, it is not a publication of the project but a ‘completely personal interpretation of Herculaneum’ (p 10), aimed at visitors to the site. As such he outlines the historical, and some archaeological, evidence for the town's demise and summarises its excavation history, from eighteenth-century Bourbon tunnelling, through Amedeo Maiuri's early twentieth-century excavations, to Sara Bisel's study of skeletal remains excavated from boat sheds along the ancient waterfront in the 1980s. Further chapters discuss the inhabitants and the domestic and public buildings, and their decoration, inscriptions and contents, either removed by the Bourbon excavations or excavated, restored and presented by Maiuri to assist visitor interpretation. Here Wallace-Hadrill explains how these processes, particularly Maiuri's ‘open-air museum’ and its lack of continued maintenance, have necessitated the Herculaneum Conservation Project's programme of work to conserve these remains, to complete the analyses of materials and also to excavate cesspits in parts of the site.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, former Director of the British School at Rome, is well known to scholars working in Roman Campania for his book, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Almost since his first interest in this area he has lamented the lack of scholarly attention to Herculaneum, compared with Pompeii. In this book he is also concerned to demonstrate the importance of Herculaneum as a tourist destination. At the same time he exposes many of the reasons why Herculaneum has received less attention than Pompeii. Essentially the greater ease with which excavators have been able to remove the softer volcanic debris from Pompeii and so uncover great swathes of the town more rapidly has rendered it more accessible to visits by continually increasing numbers of cultural tourists. Maiuri unearthed some six urban blocks of Herculaneum, the extent of which, together with both earlier and later excavations, is rather small compared with the more than seventy, often much larger, blocks exposed across Pompeii. Similarly the contrasting wealth and availability of recording – not just the original excavation reports but ongoing study of the extant remains – have for nearly 300 years provided material for scholars to study, tourists to visit, novelists to write about and film-makers to make films about. Accessibility and information breed interest and more information. The current state of Herculaneum is indeed a result of Bourbon secrecy surrounding their excavations and the difficulties faced in maintaining the openly excavated areas. That said, since Maiuri made parts of this site visitable, there has been a steady trickle of national and international scholars working at Herculaneum, as is evident in Wallace-Hadrill's list of further reading. The quantity of these studies is perhaps proportional to those concerning the more extensive Pompeian remains.

Wallace-Hadrill devotes one chapter specifically to comparing the importance of Herculaneum to Pompeii. While the very different volcanic conditions of these two sites and their excavation processes mean that for Herculaneum much organic material (skeletons, wooden furniture and written documents) has been better preserved in situ, and many fine works of art are now preserved in museums around the world, they have also meant that much of the marble statuary and marble flooring, which Wallace-Hadrill argues was lacking in a less elite Pompeii, was robbed out long before the site was officially ‘excavated’. In addition the considerable wall-painting remains in Pompeii allowed August Mau to develop a typology and to demonstrate their chronological sequence. With only six urban blocks and a handful of houses excavated in Herculaneum, such systematic analyses there are more difficult.

As its name suggests, the Herculaneum Conservation Project is a management programme for this cultural heritage site. At the same time, with new techniques, it continues investigation of the human skeletal remains and also analyses the archaeozoological and archaeobotanical contents of the newly excavated cesspits. There is no evidence in this book to show that it involves study of the remains excavated by Maiuri that are so badly in need of conservation. It is to be hoped that this focus stems from the aims of this book rather than from the project's overall remit, such that the latter can truly conserve Herculaneum for all interested groups, including the local Ercolano community, whose lives continue to be impacted on by the site's visitors.

This ‘coffee-table’ book is extremely lavishly illustrated, with fold-out illustrations showing both the wealth of the Herculaneum remains and the devastation caused over the last ninety years of their exposure to the elements. Rather frustratingly, the single site map (p 39) does not indicate the locations of many of the buildings and features discussed, and the fish-eye lens images make ‘reading’ these buildings difficult.